My Name is Paul H Cosentino. I started this Blog in 2011 because of what I believe to be wrongdoings in town government. This Blog is to keep the citizens of Templeton informed. It is also for the citizens of Templeton to post their comments and concerns.

Netflix’s recent announcement that it would
be producing a second season of
Thirteen Reasons Why has raised new questions
about the disastrous state of the US public school system and its effects on
the economy.

“Hey, it’s Hannah Baker,” says the show’s protagonist,
played by a stunning Katherine Langford in the opening episode. “Get settled
in. Because I'm about to tell you the story of my life. More specifically, why
my life ended.”

The Thirteen Reasons’ portrait of how a stifling,
bureaucratic system progressively cuts this teenage girl to pieces, eventually
driving her to death, provides a dramatized, insightful reflection on (another)
emerging lost generation.

The statistics are grim: a third
of 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. live at home
according to the US Census
Bureau.
Homeserve
USA
finds that nearly one in three Americans can’t come up with $500 to
fund an emergency. As if that were not enough, according to the US
Congressional Budget Office, governments have saddled today’s young with more
than $100 trillion worth of pension and healthcare debts.

The harder truth depicted in Thirteen
Reasons
Why is that today’s high school graduates emerge with few skills, little education
and a sanitized view of the world. In short, they are totally unprepared to take
on the challenges they face.

Following are Thirteen Reasons Why:

1. Thirteen years in jail

In Thirteen Reasons, Hannah, the bullied
protagonist has no way to escape a toxic environment. Her helpless position
progressively worsens and eventually drives her to suicide.

Because education is compulsory in the
United States, Hannah lives in a de facto prison. She cannot change schools or
classes without parental approval and undergoing a humiliating bureaucratic
process.

An education system that prioritized
learning would put students at the center, leaving them free to choose their schools,
classes, teachers and programs.

2. American kids can’t vote

The challenges facing American kids are
exacerbated by the fact that they aren’t allowed to vote. They thus have little
stake in the system, no sense of responsibility and adopt a de facto poise of
helplessness.

3. Students
come last

None of the dozen studies reviewed for this
article assessed the US public education system based on students’ needs.

Governments prioritize public education
based on its effects on national competitiveness. Businesses focus on getting skilled
workers (whose training they don’t want to pay for). Teachers’ unions focus on salaries
and working conditions.

The upshot is that students’ interests come
last.

4. Bloated administrations

America spends
more per student than any other country
yet ranks 14th in terms of results,
behind Russia. Must of this is due to legions of highly-paid administrators that
clog the system with rules, regulations and forms, few of which prioritize
education.

5. Kids taught to worship government; shun
individual responsibility

The young have always been concerned with
social causes. It’s thus hardly surprising that teachers would encourage
students to prioritize government’s role in healthcare, welfare and environmental
regulation.

High school graduates thus emerge as easy
prey for politicians who claim that near-unlimited government spending and borrowing
are the cure for the nation’s problems. (
See
the Krugman con
).

6. Public schools teach no marketable
skills

The greatest indictment of the
public-school system’s actual performance relates to the fact that students
graduate with no marketable skills.

If America’s kids emerged from schools able
to read, write, do basic math, type, work as a team and use a half dozen common
software packages, they would have something to show for their 13 years in the
slammer.

7. Banning Ayn Rand and Huckleberry Finn

Socrates’ motto at the Agora was to
“question everything.” However public schools prioritize politically correct
doctrine that consciously excludes key ideas and concepts.

Ayn Rand, the most important philosopher of
the 20th century, is essentially banned from the public system, as is Mark
Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn, which Hemingway cited as the root of American
literature. History teaching in America, as Niall Ferguson has noted, is
sanitized to the point of rendering it almost counterproductive.

8. State-directed curricula: one size fits
all

Students vary as do the communities they
live in. However a disproportionate amount of teaching is dictated by bureaucrats.
This leaves teachers little flexibility to adjust based on students’ needs.

These differ based on whether the school in
located in poorer neighborhoods where many students come from single family
homes, or in upper middle-class professional communities where traditional
family structures are more common.

9. Kids graduate clueless about finances

Public schools teach essentially nothing
about managing money, likely the single most important life skill a kid could
have. Students graduate thus thinking that borrowing is fine.

One of the biggest weaknesses in public and
private schools is their collective worship of “hoop jumpers,” - that universal
collection of the obsequious sorts that clutter Dean’s lists and other “Top
Students” awards.

This wouldn’t be a problem if schools were
able to correctly identify top performers. However heavy state-defined
curricula force teachers to “teach to the test.”

This leads to the advancement of drone-like
students who are able to recite mindless data, massaged concepts and formulas,
and more dangerously: with the need to guess and kow-tow to what teachers want
them to say.

Worse, in two centuries of public
schooling, teachers still fall for that old trap of giving the best marks to
kids with nice hand-writing or to math students who get the wrong answer but
manage to “show their work.” Students who challenge conventional thinking are
smiled at and given a B.

The upshot is the students with drive,
curiosity and creativity are quickly driven out.

The number one students - like John Maynard
Keynes, the father of modern economics, who taught that the best way to get
rich was to spend more than you earn - rocket through the system, and now run
the nation’s central banks and university economics departments.

You get the picture.

11. Powerful unions

In a world in which students are stuck in de
facto prisons, teachers, who spend more time with them than their parents do,
ought to be their biggest backers. They aren’t.

Teachers thus need to accept the lion’s
share of the blame for the disastrous state of American schools.

That blame starts with the fact that
teachers’ first priority has been to band into powerful unions, which put
salaries, benefits and vacation time first and students’ interests last.

12. Millionaire teachers

True, teachers perform one of society’s
most useful functions. However during a time of strained public finances
students’ needs must come first - not teachers’ salaries.

The gap between teachers and those
communities they teach in is exacerbated by the fact that gold-plated,
state-guaranteed pensions mean that public school teachers generally retire as
millionaires.

If teachers were paid at market rates,
there would be more money available to fund students’ needs such as smaller
class sizes, libraries and computers.

13. Mediocre teachers that can’t be fired

Teachers begin their careers ranked among most
socially-committed of any professionals. But as with any human beings, a change
takes hold of teachers once they acquire tenure and can no longer be fired.

Office hours and volunteer activities
shrink, emails from students and parents are returned slower, if at all. The
upshot is that many of the best teachers decline towards mediocrity as their
careers advance.

*****

The takeaway for the alternative investors,
who wonder how the American public could so easily fall for politicians,
economists and central bankers that are running US productivity into the
ground, the answer is clear.

America’s public schools may be leaving
their graduates incapable of assessing the stakes.

Peter Diekmeyer is a business writer/editor with Sprott Money News,
the National Post and Canadian Defence Review. He has studied in MBA,
CA and Law programs and filed reports from more than two dozen
countries.

The
views and opinions expressed in this material are those of the author
as of the publication date, are subject to change and may not
necessarily reflect the opinions of Sprott Money Ltd. Sprott Money does
not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, timeliness and reliability of
the information or any results from its use.

1 comment:

In my opinion our school systems have been designed by the Corporation we call The United States of America Inc. You can read all about this in You Know Something is Wrong When... An American Affidavit for Probable Cause by Anna Von Reitz and James Clinton Belcher. This short article by John Taylor Gatto is timely.

33. An Enclosure Movement For Children: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

An Enclosure Movement For Children

The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn, and it isn't supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn't made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that's where real meaning is found, that is the classroom's lesson, however indirectly delivered.

The decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development aren't hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn't significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn't answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn't contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless. This phenomenon has been well-understood at least since the time of the British enclosure movement which forced small farmers off their land into factory work. Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy — these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another. Continued